14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is at 400 million users worldwide right now and it’s not slowing down. At some point though, it's going to run out of potential users, there are 'only' about 1.7 billion people online today. Still, there are more than six billion people in total and five billion of them will have a mobile phone by the end of this year according to some estimates.
So, as a text-only version of the site designed to be accessible by as many 'non-smart' phones as possible makes so much sense, it's a surprise it took Facebook so long to come up with one. But it has and, while the details are still sketchy, Facebook Zero, as it will be called, is very interesting from several perspectives.
The first one is obvious: it will open up the site to a much wider audience that wouldn't normally be able to access it on their phones. In fact, they may not even have a PC or an internet connection. In developing countries, computers are a luxury and even electricity is unavailable to a lot people. But you can bet that many of them do have or are planning on buying a mobile phone.
Of course, these are very low-end devices, with hardly a color screen, not to mention a web browser, which, apparently, will be required for Facebook Zero. But this is changing and slightly more capable devices are getting into people's hands. They won't be able to run a full-fledged web browser but they'll be able to run the stripped down versions of the site.
And this is where the interesting part of the announcement comes in, as Facebook is looking to partner with carriers to offer the service to their customers. The idea is that carriers will offer Facebook Zero free of charge to their subscribers as a sort of 'demo version' of the site. If the users want to view any multimedia content on the site, images, video, etc, then they will be charged according to the carriers’ data plans.
This benefits everyone involved, Facebook potentially gets more users, mobile carriers get more people using and paying for data access, and the users, well, they get to spend more time on Facebook, regardless whether that's a good thing or not. The site is now live in a way, though there's nothing to see yet and Facebook seems to be working on it. Facebook’s existing mobile site is already quite popular (story via TechCrunch).